Field
This disclosure relates generally to data processing systems, and more specifically, to data processing systems which utilize speculative fetching.
Related Art
Speculative instruction fetching is often used to increase performance of a processor by fetching instructions that may or may not be used later. These fetches usually occur early in the processor pipeline such that if those instructions are later determined to be needed by the processor, they are immediately available, thus increasing performance. However, there are times when after fetches have been initiated down a speculative path, it is determined, later in the processor pipeline, that those fetches are no longer needed. Furthermore, if any of those fetches which are no longer needed resulted in an instruction cache miss, the processor may be stalled waiting for those accesses to complete before the processor can recover and continue fetching down the correct path.